THE CIRCULATION OF TEE BLOOD 467 



The English physician to whom belongs the honor of having first shown that 

 the course of the blood is nothing less than a kind of perpetual movement in 

 a circle. 



Elsewhere Bartholinus declared : 



To have had the glory of discovering the movements of the heart and blood 

 was enough for one man. 



Haller, a very learned and discriminating authority, called the De 

 Motu, " libelhis aureus." 



I must refrain from any references to allusions to Harvey in con- 

 temporary English verse : both Dryden and Cowley have lines on him, 

 but they are very poor stuff indeed. 



Nor have we to-night time to discuss the large question of the 

 claims of the Italian naturalist, Cassalpino, to the honor of the discov- 

 ery, important as this undoubtedly is. Harvey's life and work, is rather 

 too large a topic for one evening hour, but perhaps enough has been 

 said to let us have some idea of both. 



The " De Motu " is the greatest single essay on a biological or med- 

 ical subject ever given to the world. It ranks on an equality with those 

 other epoch-making monographs of Jenner, Schwann, Darwin, Simp- 

 son, Pasteur and Lister. Harvey did for physiology what Newton did 

 for astronomy : gave a generalization which put many isolated facts into 

 their places. It revealed an astonishing unity of plan amid manifold 

 diversities of type. So grand was the simplicity of the mechanism of 

 the circulation that that alone was enough to tell him he had attained 

 to a great truth. He saw the one design everywhere, in the heart of the 

 chick as yet unhatched, in the humblest insect, in the stately deer in the 

 Eoyal park at Windsor. Harvey's work was epoch-making, because he 

 broke with tradition and because it was founded on an experimental 

 basis. Although his name is not in the original charter-book of the 

 Eoyal Society (it could not be as its date is 1664), all Harvey's intimate 

 friends were Fellows, and there is no possible doubt but that Harvey 

 would have been in the Boyal Society, as he was in that earlier unor- 

 ganized nucleus of it at Oxford. Though a professional anatomist, he 

 studied structures to discover their uses. Just as one of Galen's books 

 is the " De usu partium," so Harvey's masterpiece is " Concerning the 

 Motion and Uses of the Heart and Arteries." Harvey is always physio- 

 logically-minded. Harvey was a great man in an age that produced 

 many great men ; he was not dwarfed by his contemporaries because 

 they too were great. What Shakespeare and Moliere are to the drama, 

 what Milton is to poetry, Bacon to prose, Bunyan to allegory, Murillo 

 and Bembrandt to painting, Wren to architecture, Grotius to interna- 

 tional law and theology, Galileo and Newton to terrestrial and celestial 

 physics (and these, all his contemporaries, are masters), such is Wil- 

 liam Harvey in the realm of the knowledge of the most important 

 system in the bodies of living beings. 



